---
title: Install amcharts and highcharts into a Ruby on Rails app
slug: install-amcharts-and-highcharts-into-a-ruby-on-rails-app
published_at: 2021-04-09 17:00:07 +0000
updated_at: 2026-03-04 20:14:19 +0000
summary: 
description: #rails #rubyonrails
tags: [amcharts, highcharts, javascript stock chart, install amcharts, install highcharts, ruby on rails, install amcharts with ruby on rails, install highcharts with ruby on rails, ruby on rails tutorial, ruby, rails, ror, learn to code, stock chart, js chart, javascript chart, install javascript stock chart]
views: 1580
author: CJ Avilla
url: https://www.cjav.dev/videos/install-amcharts-and-highcharts-into-a-ruby-on-rails-app
youtube_url: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IOtr9E02PZM
youtube_id: IOtr9E02PZM
embed_url: https://www.youtube.com/embed/IOtr9E02PZM
thumbnail_url: https://i.ytimg.com/vi/IOtr9E02PZM/hqdefault.jpg
type: video
---

# Install amcharts and highcharts into a Ruby on Rails app

*Published: April 09, 2021*
*Views: 1580*

## Watch

[Watch on YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IOtr9E02PZM)

[![Install amcharts and highcharts into a Ruby on Rails app](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/IOtr9E02PZM/hqdefault.jpg)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IOtr9E02PZM)

## Description

#rails #rubyonrails

## Transcript

in this episode we're going to play around with am charts and high charts two javascript libraries for rendering stock charts onto your html pages we're going to show how to install them with rails in using webpacker and npm and we'll experiment with some of the demos that they have just to get them on the page to help us decide between which one of these final contenders we will use for our stock chart display now if you're following along you'll know that in a previous episode we uh talked about how to pick between third-party libraries and we evaluated four or five different stock chart libraries and we landed on am charts and high charts as the final contenders so this episode is all about how to install them and play around with them so we'll start with am charts here and you'll see that it has like an npm install tool which allows you to install am charts for but also geodata and fonts i i see here that font files are used for pdf so i don't actually need that i'm not going to render pdfs and then geodata is for maps don't care about maps so i really should just be able to say npm install am charts am charts 4 here so i this is the directory in which my rails application lives and i think the very first thing we want to do is just say like rails webpacker colon install this will install the webpacker tools for working with rails and it does require that you have a node version which is uh over 10.17 my globally installed node version is um yeah 10 10 16. so i'm going to use node n to set my local node version to 14.15.1 and now i should be able to rerun rails webpacker install if you have uh if you run into the instance or the scenario where you need to have multiple versions of node installed which is pretty common then i i do like working with node end and i would recommend it uh for managing different uh node versions that one of the reasons why i really like it is that the api like the the command line interface for working with node end is very similar to our bend or rb ruby n which is the the environment manager or the ruby the ruby version manager that i prefer so it's nice to have both of those with the same sort of or like a very very similar interface okay it does take a little bit for webpacker to set up all right now that we've got webpacker installed the next step is to install our library so we're going to just say npm install let's copy this command here and run it i think you could also do save if you want this to end up in the package.json file that's in the root of the project and while that's installing let's go take a look and see if we can find some demos here for how to use this so we'll go to the demos page and we care about stock charts i'll just grab the first stock chart here down below it shows javascript or typescript es6 because we're using webpacker i believe we can use this import style and we'll just create a new pack a new javascript pack that has all of this code so i'm actually just going to copy the entire thing and just dump that into a new pack file okay this is still going come on npm let's go all right so i have a i have another terminal here where i'm gonna start up uh rails server and i'm also gonna start up uh bin web pack dev server which will like reload and refresh our webpacker um i forget what they're called it's like the manifest the webpack manifest so now it's just like it's gonna find files in slash packs so we'll go create a new javascript file called am charts.js and we will load that as a pack okay cool so that finished so we're going to go into app javascripts packs and inside of here we're going to create a new pack called am charts dot js and we're just going to paste in all of the code we have here in this demo now this should work because we just installed these two uh these two tools um and it looks like yeah so i don't it doesn't really show us any html in this demo maybe yes there's no html it just shows you kind of like that source code so let's see what we can do with this so where is this actually going to show up like we at this point we have a brand new rails app we have a job we have a model but we don't have any views so it's going to have we have a default view but we're not actually like loading any views so let's generate a controller just so we have some views so we'll say rails g controller charts and we'll just have an index view to start with so charts index.html and in charts index.html we want to put a pack tag and i can't remember the exact syntax but there's one in the layout file or in this like application html erb that shows how to install the javascript pack so it's the this we call this ruby method javascript pack tag and then you give it the name of the pack so in this case am charts right and um in our routes file we should have okay get charts indexed we can say resources charts and we'll just see if that works and now if we fire up localhost 3000 slash charts it should load okay so webpacker can't find amtrak let's see if that's what we actually named it so we go into javascript packs am charts that's definitely what it's called let's see if we need to restart the webpack dev server because we added a new file i don't know if that's required um let's see if we refresh yeah so webpack output is served from slash packs okay um maybe it's still trying to figure that out let's see so it says this is what the manifest contains so yeah we do want it to rebuild sort of rebuild the manifest so it seems like it has not yet webpack has not yet rerun to reflect the updates okay cool so it looks like a bunch of stuff was just spit out here um which all looks somewhat relevant and if we refresh the page okay great so now we see charts i'm going to open up the terminal and see if we have any errors and it looks like we do am for plugins range selector is not defined okay so this one used at the very bottom at a range selector am4 plugins range selector is not defined so i don't know what the this range selector thing is i'm guessing that it needed to be imported but just wasn't or maybe it's not available as part of core or as part of charts right now i really don't care too much i'm just going to comment it out and see if we're able to fix it from that okay html container chart div was not found so we probably need to create some sort of chart div container i'm guessing that has like that's like the id or something charts html um maybe we need a div here with id what was it called chart div so that's probably where it's going to like mount into i would guess oh look at that okay so we have something we have something on the screen this is cool all right so that's that's how you install am charts into a rails application uh now uh okay so we could go and play around with all of this stuff um all these different settings to get it looking the way that we want but i think we're going to call it good there and move on to part two which is we want to install high charts and see if we can get high charts working in a similar way and then we'll kind of like play around with play around with high charts also so a couple things we needed to change we needed to remove this bottom select range selector and then we also needed to add a chart div neither of which were super clear from just like copying and pasting the code i bet there's probably some more detail here potentially it actually doesn't huh but i guess in the javascript version they show you some style okay so i bet i bet if we like put this style into it ends up looking a little better let's see yeah okay so that looks so much prettier right but like they didn't include that in the typescript es6 version and okay so here's another one right here's the plugin that's loaded from the cdn version in javascript but not it didn't show you that in uh in the typescript es6 version oh look at that here at the bottom we have uh a div so it has some html so it would i guess my feedback to the am charts team would be let's update this snippet so that it has this html and that it has this style stuff so that it ends up looking just as nice when we do it with typescript or es6 okay so let's move on to high charts and take a look so if we split this now let's uh let's actually create a new view so we'll go into a charts controller and we'll just call uh we'll call this one like uh we'll just use the show page this is we're like really abusing index and show but whatever it's fine okay so in the show view we're gonna have a pack tag that's like hi charts and then we'll create a pack called hi charts.js and what does this look like so high charts we can also install with npm so we'll do that now okay and while that's installing let's take a look at their demos so stock demos that's the one that we care about and the one i'm particularly interested in is having these flags or whatever the event markers so if we look at what is this okay so this is the all the code to get it running or it's a config preview it doesn't actually tell you all right so we can edit either in jsfiddle or codepen that's pretty cool and i'm guessing this is just different like themes maybe yeah okay so you can have a really dark or textured background or a light grid the default is fine we just want to like see if see if we can get it working so let's open up jsfiddle okay this one does give us some html and it gives us some javascript so we'll copy this html tag here and we want to go to the show page and let's see so we're going to say that's our html and then for our javascript just copy all of this and go to our pack for high charts and just paste everything in and high charts is not going to be defined because we haven't imported it so because we're using npm and we're not using the cdn here we need to figure out how this generally is imported or where it's imported from so when we were looking at okay the official npm package read more about how to install high charts with npm okay load high charts with require we're not going to use require but let's just see if we can use uh import import high charts from and then this high chart high chart or high stock let's see all right so if we refresh the page here oh we want to go to charts 1 or something okay webpacker can't find high charts we added a new pac file so let's restart our webpack dev server and oh that's going to take a second again to refresh i don't know why webpack takes so long like when we're working with create react app or something it's super fast right okay uncaught type error high charts tie stock webpack imported module default a get get json is not a function let's take a look okay so it looks like the high charts library is supposed to expose some function called get json which takes in a path and presumably returns the json for this path let's just see what happens if we go directly to this okay so the the data that comes back from this url is just like some json data that is an array of tuples where i'm guessing this is like a time stamp yeah it's probably a date yeah okay so 2007 a 101 2007.0102 so these are like unix timestamps that are in some fancy format that has three extra zeros uh okay so uh so really what we need to do is we need to fetch this json data and then we need to pass it down into high chart stock stuff so let's see hi chart or let's just add a break point and then refresh the page is this actually getting imported hi charts okay so because we're using webpacker we don't actually like the name of the variable that's available is not actually the name that's here it gets renamed to this imported module situation and if we did like dot what's another method that's called here i guess stock chart yeah okay so theoretically as long as we get this json back we should be able to pass that data down i don't know why this is saying that get json doesn't exist but it doesn't really matter because yeah it doesn't okay so let's use fetch so we can use the fetch api and pass in this same url and then let's see so before it was saying like once the json resolves call the variable data so that might be interesting or important since we're using fetch we want to say.then and we want to convert the response into json and we can use a weight here because this is an async thing and we're going to say the data is equal to await fetch go fetch that data now because i'm using a weight at the top level here it's not inside of an async function i'm gonna have to wrap this whole thing i saw a proposal i think it was a proposal i don't know if this is available anywhere but you can do like async do async do and then a block like this um i don't think this is available anywhere but let's just try it out and see uh exploded yeah okay i don't think that's i don't think it's out yet but there's a proposal for this async do let's just take a little sidebar async do it was like i saw like a github page recently where async do proposal tc39 it's gonna be like a new javascript here we go check this out this is gonna be like a new or it's a proposal for a new javascript concept where you can like use async do then you pass it a block and then you can do await stuff inside because the alternative is that here we're going to have to write an immediately invoked function expression which uh which looks something like that and then we can just make it an async one so it's an uh an async immediately invoked function expression purely so that we can use a weight at the top level which is like sort of annoying and not helpful but i think this might work so we should we're expecting we're going to get some data back from this so let's refresh the page let's move our breakpoint down a little bit and then step over over play what are we getting oh my gosh look at that beautiful it's already there and we've got the events hovering over it event with description this is so it's so nice gosh okay so oh yeah look at this it's even animated look one year boom it like animates down okay i think i'm pretty sure well let's take a look back at am charts and see yeah this one okay so it takes this one took a little bit longer to load oh that's nice okay so this one animates also wow all right so the trade-offs here are that high charts didn't the get json method on high charts didn't work the range selector on am charts didn't work the am charts typescript version didn't show how to add the html or that the html was required the high charts version shows this really old school way of doing npm install instead of like you know importing an import statement the high charts demo came with flags already and that's exactly what i'm looking for so i think at this point it's clear that i'm just going to pick high charts uh and we'll go with that to display our company prices and as we have trades like the idea would be that okay we're looking at this this chart uh and this might be the the chart for pagerduty or for microsoft or something right like and we want to see when insiders traded which we'll we'll be able to find that information directly through the sec's public data sources and then we'll just sort of like map that information onto this chart so that's what we'll do in a future episode and otherwise we'll see you in the next one where we're going to actually take some real data from the database and plop it on this chart alright thanks so much for watching you

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